Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Java)

Location: New York, NY, United States; hybrid model requiring 3 days per week in the office

Salary: $208,500–$216,500 per year

Company

hirify.global is a mealtime platform combining dishes from 20+ restaurants in one order and operating the dining experience, culinary operations, and supporting technology at scale.

What you will do

• Define standard architecture for Java services calling ML models, including client libraries, API contracts, latency budgets, and fallbacks.
• Set load-testing, benchmarking, capacity-planning, and release-process standards for model integrations.
• Improve high-traffic deployments through profiling, JVM tuning, caching, batching, and concurrency work.
• Lead cross-team ML architecture and delivery, building reusable pipelines and deployment patterns.
• Set standards for ML reliability, monitoring, lifecycle management, reproducible training, safe rollouts, and SLOs.
• Own the technical roadmap, conduct reviews, mentor engineers, participate in hiring, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep expertise building and operating high-traffic Java backend services.
• 5+ years building and running production ML systems, including 3+ years setting technical direction across teams or systems.
• Expert Java and object-oriented design skills, Spring Boot or similar service frameworks, REST or gRPC APIs, and JVM performance tuning.
• Experience setting load-testing and performance standards using Gatling, JMeter, or similar tools, and planning capacity as load changes.
• Experience designing highly available distributed systems with 99.99% uptime, automated testing, and monitoring.
• Production ML architecture experience covering training pipelines, batch and real-time serving, feature pipelines, model versioning, and rollback at scale.
• Strong Python and hands-on model development with XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch, or TensorFlow, including tuning models under latency and cost limits.
• Strong Spark and SQL data engineering skills, including debugging streaming or batch pipelines.
• Deep AWS or GCP infrastructure experience, including SageMaker, Vertex AI, or equivalent, plus Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experimentation experience with A/B test design, guardrail metrics, and evaluating misleading offline metrics.
• Technical leadership across ML and software engineering teams, architecture reviews beyond the immediate team, influence without direct authority, mentoring senior engineers, and clear communication with technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Marketplace, e-commerce, or logistics experience, including ranking, recommendations, ETA prediction, pricing, or dispatch.
• Experience serving models inside or alongside JVM services, such as ONNX Runtime, TensorFlow Java, or XGBoost4J.
• Experience building internal ML platforms used by multiple science teams.
• Cassandra or another distributed NoSQL database.
• Kafka, Flink, or other streaming data systems.
• Experience leading an ML platform migration between clouds.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with 3 required office days per week and the option to work in the office up to 5 days.
• Benefits include equity, 401(k), medical, dental, vision, disability coverage, paid time off, sick leave, parental leave, discounted meals, and brand perks.
• hirify.global participates in E-Verify and does not sponsor employment visas for this role.
• Inclusive hiring practices and interview accommodations are available upon request.

Hiring process

• The interview process includes the same Java coding interview used for software engineering roles.
• Interview scheduling and candidacy updates are provided by email or text.